Scrible was just at the New Jersey Association of School Librarians (NJASL) Fall Conference at the Ocean Place Resort and Spa in Long Branch the week before Thanksgiving!

Our Cofounder/CEO Victor loved meeting and hanging out with librarians and attendees from all over New Jersey. He chatted with and showed them Scrible at our booth.

We were excited to see that our session was well attended, with 50 engaged librarians attending and asking questions! The session was title and description were:

Scrible + Google = Personalized Learning for Research and Writing!50% of secondary students struggle with research and aren’t ready for college writing. Using Scrible with G Suite instills strong research/writing skills. Scrible lets students curate, annotate and collaborate on articles and offers citations/bibliographies and Google Docs integration, helping students organize their work. Real-time analytics enable teachers to track student progress and personalize interventions.

Conference attendees loved Scrible. So, we’re excited to have them try Scrible at their schools!

The Scrible Team was excited to be at the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) National Conference in Phoenix last week! We had a blast hanging out with school librarians from all over the country.

Opening Keynote

Google Booth

Following his speech, Jaime went to the Google booth to hang out with throngs of engaged librarians… And that’s where we were! As a Google for Education Partner, we were stationed there next to Google’s Connor Regan, who was there representing Be Internet Awesome (BIA), Google’s initiative on digital safety and citizenship for kids. BIA was a great complement to our discussions about media literacy. We loved neighboring and partnering with Connor! He told folks about us and we returned the favor. 🙂

Unconference

We were excited to be invited by Joyce Valenza – a leading voice and thought leader on school librarianship – to present Scrible at the Unconference at the end of Day 1. It was fun and the highlight was the passionate, funny and boisterous Nancy Jo Lambert – a leading teacher librarian from Frisco ISD – interjecting her enthusiastic support for Scrible to Unconference participants during our presentation! Check it out here:

Librarian Love

We were happy to demo Scrible for school librarians from across the country. We were excited to see they loved Scrible! We look forward to them trying Scrible at their schools with their teachers and students!

You spoke and we listened! PDF annotation is one of our most requested features. Well, it’s here now, along with a new way of working with PDFs! We’re proud to announce the new Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator.

You’d think so. So much of the world’s knowledge has moved to webpages, but Phil Ydens, VP of Engineering at Adobe, reports 1.6 billion PDFs are on the Web and 73M new PDFs are saved to Google Drive/Gmail daily. Obviously, you’re not reading news in PDFs, but research studies, business reports and white papers, academic and scholarly articles and the like are all still published, shared and consumed in PDF… And that’s just the new stuff. There’s a treasure trove of legacy PDFs. Altogether, Phil estimates 2.5 trillion PDFs in the world. That’s with a t. Whoa.

OK, but a PDF app? Isn’t that retro? Haven’t there been a million PDF viewers since the 90s?

Yeah, but times have changed. We spend way more time in browsers and using cloud-based apps like Google Apps these days. Legacy PDF viewers were built for the Desktop Era. It’s time to go back to the future with a modern way to work with a legacy file format. Our new PDF Viewer/Annotator is browser-based, auto-saves your PDFs and annotations to the cloud, enables real-time collaboration, fits seamlessly into your Web browsing experience and integrates with Google Drive. Welcome to the future.

Enough with the prologue. Let’s show you the new hotness… Oh, but first… If you’re new to Scrible, sign upand add our Chrome Extension (strongly recommended) or Bookmarklet first.

PDF VIEWER

Opening a PDF in your Scrible Library now opens it in our new PDF Viewer/Annotator. That’s in Chrome, Firefox and Safari (Sorry IE/Edge users). Here’s an example, showing brilliant comments by Elon Tusk on a NASA paper about Mars missions:

Menu of Options/Tools

The menu of options/tools shown atop the PDF is magnified here:

Each option/tool should be self-evident. If not, hover over each one to display a tooltip that’ll clarify its purpose.

Sidebar

The right-most button toggles a Sidebar on/off with separate tabs for various useful tools/info about the PDF.

Thumbnails Tab in Sidebar Citations Tab in Sidebar

PDF ANNOTATION

You can annotate PDFs using different colored highlights and comments right in your browser. Awesomeness.

In PDF Land, comments replace the notes you see in our webpage annotation tools. Don’t worry… We’ll update the Web annotation approach in the future and restore balance to the Force. Comments appear in the Comments Bar and are anchored to text in the PDF so it’s clear what’s being discussed.

We’ll be bringing more annotation tools to PDFs. A few of the Web annotation features loved by our Pro users – like Underline and Legends – aren’t yet in PDF Land, but they’re coming. Hang tight.

AUTO-SAVE

PDFs and all annotations made to them are auto-saved to your Scrible Library. (Mic drop)

…(Um. Picking mic back up) When auto-saving is underway, you’ll see a yellow icon spinning next to the Highlight Button. Otherwise, you’ll see a green check mark there like you see above.

COMMENT REPLIES

In PDF Land, you can reply to someone else’s comment on a shared PDF. Know what that means? You can have discussions right in the margin of the PDF. You comment. Elon replies. You reply. He replies and shuts you down. Well, better luck next time.

REAL-TIME COLLABORATION

We built this Google Docs-style. What’s that mean? You know how multiple people can edit the same Google Doc at the same time? Same deal here. Elon and his team can see each other’s annotations on a shared PDFin real-time as they’re made. So, no waiting for Gwynne to send you her comments before you add yours and then send them to Tom. You can all just access, comment and reply whenever you’re free and everyone else can see your comments immediately. You’re welcome.

WEB BROWSING INTEGRATION

Let’s say you’re researching on the Web. You find a golden PDF and you’re viewing it in the browser. Just click our Chrome Extension or Bookmarklet* to load the PDF in the Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator. It’s autosaved and ready to annotate. In 1 click, the file is yours and ready to work with without leaving your Web browsing or online research flow. Nice.

GOOGLE DRIVE INTEGRATION

Right click on a PDF file in your Google Drive and select Open with > scrible to open the PDF in the Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator, which auto-saves the file to your Scrible Library and lets you to annotate it. Easy peasy.

To enable this, authorize us to connect the Scrible PDF Viewer/Annotator to your Google Drive by clicking the Authorize Button next to Annotate PDFs from Google Drive under Settings > Connected Apps when you’re signed into your Scrible account.

This is all new! So, please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions or hit any problems! Thanks!

–The Scrible Team

* – Some folks might need to re-add our Bookmarklet for this to work. If that’s you, right click on the Scrible Toolbar Bookmarklet in your browser’s bookmarks bar, choose Delete and then re-add the Bookmarklet from our Tools Page.

Microsoft users, we’ve heard from you that you want scrible to work with your Microsoft products. Today, we’re happy to announce that anyone with a Microsoft Office 365 account can now sign up and sign into scrible using their Office 365 account instead of creating and managing a separate scrible password.

Just click on the new red Office 365 icon along the bottom of our Sign Up or Sign In pages to get started.

We were invited to participate in the the EdSurge Silicon Valley Tech for Schools Summit this past Saturday! It’s our 3rd time! It’s always a competitive to process to be invited, with lots of interesting ed tech companies vying for an chance to meet tech savvy teachers face-to-face to demo powerful new products and get feedback to improve them for classroom use. We’re grateful to EdSurge and the local education leaders who evaluated us and found scrible Edu compelling.

In past years, it was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. For the first time, this year’s Summit was held in the East Bay at the beautiful, new La Escuelita Elementary School in Oakland, CA. Our CEO was there, along with two great educators who are big believers in our mission and have used scrible in-class with their own students.

Thanks to the great Bay Area teachers and administrators who spent time with us! Your enthusiasm for scrible is awesome! We’re excited to support you as you help your students develop the vital research and writing skills they need for college and beyond.

Just in time for the new school year!… This summer, we updated our default MLA citation style format to the new 8th Edition published by the Modern Language Association in April of this year. Edu Pro users can still search for and use the MLA 6th and 7th Edition formats. Please let us know if you have any questions or spot any issues with our update.

Online research platform provider scrible launches scrible Edu, a new ed tech product that streamlines the student research and writing process with GAFE integrations and gives educators visibility into that workflow with rich data.

SAN MATEO, CA – APRIL 13, 2016

scrible, the leading innovator in online research technology and a Google for Education Partner, has launched scrible Edu, a new education product that streamlines the student research and writing process and gives educators unprecedented visibility into that workflow for personalized learning.

scrible offers a Web application that allows Internet users to richly annotate webpages in the browser and manage and collaborate on them online. CEO Victor Karkar explains, “This launch adds a new emphasis on writing. We’re extending the strength of our online research platform into the writing realm. We’re helping students write better papers faster and helping educators support the modern information literacy skills students need for college and career success.”

scrible Edu offers students 1-Click Citations, 1-Click Bibliographies, Google Drive integration and a Google Docs Add-on for free. It also includes free classroom capabilities for educators, including class structure, Class Libraries and Google Classroom Sync. Upgrading to the paid Edu Pro tier offers assignment and analytics features that support personalized learning.

Phil Kim, Innovation Manager at KIPP Bay Area Schools, says, “The integration of Google Docs and Classroom made the process of transition to scrible Edu seamless. Victor and the scrible Team have been exceptionally responsive to the feedback our teachers and students have, and they’ve gone above and beyond to ensure that scrible’s platform is user-centered.”

1-Click Citations and Bibliographies enable simple citation capture and bibliography creation. Google Drive integration and the scrible Writer Google Docs Add-on allow a student to bring their research into a paper as they’re writing in Google Docs. They can search their scrible Library for annotations (e.g. notes & highlights) and citations from within a Google Doc and view them alongside the paper. They can click to insert the annotations into the paper as quotes with accompanying in-text citations. The citations and bibliography are automatically managed, compiled and appended to the Doc.

Chad O’Connor, History and English Language Arts (ELA) Teacher at the Kensington Creative and Performing Arts High Shool (KCAPA) in Philadelphia, says, “I am excited for my American History students who will use scrible’s new Google Docs infusion for their Sophomore Research Projects. Because students can export all of their annotations to a Google Doc in their Drive, it creates an efficient process for drafting essays AND facilitates a smoother transition for me in teaching them the key skills of paraphrasing and citing sources.”

Class structure enables activities in scrible Edu to mirror real world courses and sections. Google Classroom Sync lets educators easily sync their class rosters with scrible Edu to get started quickly and without manual student data entry. Each class/section automatically gets a Class Library, which educators and students can use to share curated articles for research sources, close reading exercises and class discussions.

scrible Edu Pro allows educators to create novel research project and paper assignments. Students can annotate and save sources to an assignment-specific Library and submit it for review. As a result, teachers can access a rich collection of student work and see how students organize information (using tags), read closely (using annotations), etc.

Teachers can set goals for those projects and papers (e.g. number of sources to collect or cite, number of words in the paper, etc.) and track student progress toward those goals and overall assignment completion at the class and individual student level using a real-time data dashboard. These analytics empower teachers with data to support each student with personalized guidance and intervention. Educators can see where each student is at any given time in the research and writing process and where they get stuck.

Class-level analytics showing the progress of students completing a research paper assignment

Ann Terry, Librarian at Lone Star High School in Frisco, Texas, explains, “Teachers are thrilled to be able to see the progress of their students as they view and save sources. scribe Edu gives our teachers a window into their students’ research process that they’ve never had before. scrible has changed the way Lone Star High School does online research.”

As a part of the launch, CEO Victor Karkar will present scrible Edu in Southern California this week at the Leadership 3.0 Symposium, an annual gathering of K12 administrators focused on “Educational Leadership for the 21s Century”. The Symposium is hosted by the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), Computer Using Educators, Inc. (CUE) and Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL).

Last week, we were highlighted as a hot company in the App-and-Coming area of the annual TCEA Conference in Austin! With over 8,000 attendees, TCEA is the largest gathering of teachers, librarians, administrators and technologists from schools and districts across Texas. The Conference also draws folks from other states and countries.

The educators we met loved scrible and we loved meeting them! It was inspiring to meet so many tech-savvy educators excited about our ability to help them and their students with close reading, research and writing.

We’re happy to tell you that scrible was nominated for a DILA, an education industry honor awarded by EdSurge and Digital Promise. We were nominated in the Better Together category, which recognizes organizations that include “various users and stakeholders in product/initiative design, implementation, and feedback mechanisms for continuous improvement”.

Check out the video we submitted for our award application below. It highlights some of the great K12 schools and educators we’ve worked with!

Last week, we were in Nashville for EdSurge’s Tennessee Tech for Schools Summit. For those who don’t know, EdSurge is an awesome news organization that covers education technology. They’re on the bleeding edge of what’s new and interesting in education, startups and technology and they’re a great one stop shop for anyone interested in ed tech startups and investing. They’ve been organizing and hosting Tech for Schools Summits around the country that bring together local K12 educators with some of the best ed tech startups from across the country. The latest was in Nashville. It drew teachers, librarians, IT decision makers, etc. from across Tennessee. Competition among startups hoping to participate was fierce. Many applied and only ~30 were invited. Local education experts judged the applicants to decide who made the cut. So, we were honored and excited to be invited! The scrible Team at the Summit consisted of Victor Karkar (our CEO), Andrew Biros and Cavan Klinsky. Andrew is Head of Instructional Technology, Lead Educator, Curriculum Designer and Program Manager at Kensington Creative & Performing Arts High School in Philly. Cavan is a sharp, driven and impressive Rails developer, debater, tech entrepreneur and junior at the Horace Mann School in New York City. Andrew and Cavan are fans of scrible and volunteered their time to come tell Volunteer State teachers all about scrible.

(Photo credit: Tina Osborne)

We demo’d scrible and spoke with 74+ educators from 56+ schools across Tennessee. It was amazing. Teachers loved us. Their feedback validated our value to them and their schools. When asked, Would you use this product?, 84% said Yes.

34 other educators from 29 schools rated us on the same scale as follows:

If administrators were looking to purchase this product for their school, how strongly would you advocate for this product?: 4.0

Overall impression of the product: 4.2

When asked to describe our strengths, they wrote:

“Annotation and highlight. Great product for common core. Great to prepare students for college writing.”

“Kids would be excited to use it.”

When asked how they would use scrible, they wrote:

“This tool would be usable in our middle school as a research tool. I see it as usable in cross-curricular and Project Based Learning assignments. It seems to give students all the components to complete a research project in one place.I will be sharing this with my peers.“

“It is a great tool for teaching research to students. They will learn to read, scan, take notes, summarize, create citation pages. Wow, it’s great!“

“Great annotating tool, great for close reading and research. Simple and powerful.”

When asked for reasons to recommend scrible to administrators, they wrote:

“This would be helpful in organization, research, and collaborative projects. It also provides a tool for feedback from the teacher.”

“I would recommend it for ease of use and completeness in giving students all the tools they need in one place.”

“This is an amazing tool for students to be responsible online researchers! Students, young and old, can investigate, highlight, save and appropriately annotate work they have done with research. Students can also use this tool to take notes on required topics or learn about new topics of their own interest. In today’s tech world, students need to be able to use tools like this as they investigate. New state-wide assessments will require students to do online writing and research, so this tool will help them prepare.“

“I would definitely see this beneficial for all of my classes. Citations are so crucial for our students and with our state tests.”

“I would recommend it to the ELA, science and social studies teachers who are giving research assignments.”

This feedback has been incredibly valuable! We’ve shared it with a variety of partners and it’s made a great impression… Showing how valuable scrible is for students and teachers. We want to thank EdSurge not only for drawing a great, engaged group of educators for us to speak with, but also for having fantastic, structured mechanisms and incentives to have those educators provide meaningful feedback. So often, startups spend lots of time, money and effort to attend conferences and trade shows and they may even have good conversations with attendees, but it’s rare to walk away with detailed, actionable feedback. Thank you EdSurge!